After Borges: Literary criticism and critical theory

The writings of Jorge Luis Borges are finely in tune with some of the most innovative trends in contemporary criticism and theory, especially in answer to the questioning of subjectivity and representation in the human sciences. Adopting a constructivist approach, this reading gauges the impact of Borges\u27s texts as they respond to this two-fold question through monstrosity and cartography. Whether as the hybrid, the purposeless, or the infamous, monstrosity in Borges is a multiple symbol irreducible to the concepts, forms, and final ends of classical epistemology and ontology. This groundless multiplicity is the site where the subject and object of the human sciences collapse. Borges is not only the curator of a teratological museum but his own writings have also been seen as monstrous and inhuman. This anomaly offers indispensable leverage to deconstruct the anthropocentric tradition of metaphysics. As a science of the positive unconscious, teratology is the absent center of both Michel Foucault\u27s archaeology and Jacques Derrida\u27s grammatology of the human sciences. Monstrosity remains above all a critical power--the force of alterity that is the constitutive outside of conceptual unity and identity. Cartography in Borges, to the contrary, not only is the site of a deconstruction, but also holds the promise for a constructive redefinition of representation. Following a scholastic distinction, Borges unmasks the mimetic model of Platonic realism as formally untenable and politically undesirable, while he accepts the premise of Aristotelian nominalism which views language as arbitrary. With subtle hints Borges in fact proposes a third view, most akin to pragmatism. Displacing the attention from imitating to making, his poietic cartography revolves around a principle of conjectural inference rather than a mimetic equivalence. Especially Charles S. Peirce\u27s abduction, or hypothetical code-making, serves as an alternative to the classical models of imitation and expression, as well as to the recent model of simulation. Borges at once undermines the stable foundations of ancient and modern metaphysics, along the lines of poststructuralism, and implies a constructive response to the crisis of language and subjectivity, in the vein of pragmatism